Monday, August 08, 2016

The GAA announced a new partnership deal with the GPA on July 25th of this year. Ten days later, the GAA announced an unexpected new proposal to reform the football Championship that will go before next year’s Congress and, if accepted, will start in 2018.

It may be that these events are simply a co-incidence. It may be that the money was simply resting in Father Crilly’s account. Either requires a certain suspension of disbelief.

The Irish ability to moan about the inevitable is a sad fault in the national psyche. It was this school of constant moaning about not being able to time Uncle Timmy’s return from beyond in America that lead to this A/B designation in the qualifiers, and inadvertently killed the best thing that fifteen years of the Qualifiers have given us – that extraordinary Gaelic football carnival that was the August Bank Holiday weekend.

All four quarter-finals being played over the August Bank Holiday weekend was like all the gunfighters arriving in Dodge City at the same time and you wouldn’t know who would be left standing until the smoke cleared.

That sense of occasion has been lessened by the quarter-finals now being spread over two days, even though neither Uncle Timmy nor the man in the moon knows if his team is in the A or B bracket, and Uncle Timmy as wise as ever he was in planning his return to the green isle of Erin.

Now the Association has come up with this proposal to insert a round-robin style playoff at what was the quarter-final stage, where the four provincial winners and the four survivors of the qualifiers will play each other, and the top four then go on to contest the semi-finals.

Ostensibly, this will create more games between the better teams, and free up time in the calendar to let counties properly organize their club Championships.

But wait – if the “better” teams are playing in this round-robin thing, what’s everybody else up to?

Since its inception, the mission of the GPA has been to exalt the county player as a special being within the Association. They have drawn in their horns in that regard in recent years, but leopards don’t generally change their spots. Professionalism has always been the GPA’s aim, and if they couldn’t swing it by hook they are now attempting to swing it by crook.

The Examiner’s excellent Kieran Shannon has repeatedly pointed out that one of the big causes of separation in the GAA between haves and have-nots is that there are only eight teams playing in Division 1 of the League. They get better by playing each other and, when a Division 1 team plays a team from a lower Division, the lower Division team doesn’t know what hit them until it’s all far too late. There are exceptions, but that’s generally how it works.

Now, consider that advantage coupled with the existence of a mini-Division 1 played in the best weather in which to play football, with 24 other counties looking on like Moses looking at the Promised Land, knowing that he can never go there.

Give it five years and the counties currently struggling to keep players at home long enough to play in the provincial Championships before high-tailing it to the States will be broken at last. In the meantime the elite will have become even more deeply embedded and the separation will be clear even to the dullest of minds.

It will be only logical, then, for some top players from the second-class counties to look to moving to a first-class county rather than go to the States – home birds, people who can't live without the Kerr Pinks, and so on - and that can be sorted out. It’s been done before, and after a while it will become a well-worn path.

Then the GAA will be in the same situation as rugby – eight professional teams where rugby has four, while the others continue on as before, but far, far away from the limelight and with no chance of a day in the sun again.

So far we haven’t heard how this Championship restructure idea came about, but your correspondent is willing to bet his best pair of shoes that it started with the GPA. Delegates at next year’s Congress will want to perform due diligence on this proposal, and beware of the GPA bearing gifts. Gift horses seldom work out for cities under siege.